Ya Bezzer!

For your sake I hope not!

Be grateful for small mercies, we are winning, but this game is atrocious.

Tom Boyd is easily one of the 5 best players to wear a Motherwell shirt in the 40 odd years I've been going to games. The Hall of Fame is about recognising great players that wore the shirt, not about scrutinising what club he supports or going over every line of interview he's ever done with a highlighter pen and a chip on your shoulder. If only we'd had a few more Tom Boyd's since then.

Could have been worse. With 7 teams left in the draw Rangers, Celtic and us were still waiting to be picked. In fact with three teams left Rangers and ourselves were still in the draw. Even though we are away from home I think we are still favourites to go through. Dundee are no great shakes. The 'winter break' issue is a bit of a concern though.

When? In 1895? The club had played two seasons of league football back then.

They were just interviewing Neil Lennon there and he said in quite an authoritative way that Robinson wouldn't be interested in the Northern Ireland job because he had 'club ambitions'. Then he corrected himself and said "maybe you are asking the wrong person" but the way he said it it was like he had maybe spoken to Robinson about it or knew something.

Even without his goal it would have been Allan Campbell for me.

I'm not sure I really buy into the whole maintenance cost angle at least in the long term. If you go to Fir Park or travel around the country you'll see that the Taylor report era stands that were built in the 1990s are not in the greatest nick. That suggests you have maybe a new stadium life time of about 25-30 years before you get back to square one. And it's not like new stadiums don't have any maintenance costs either, even if they are reduced you have to factor in the redevelopment costs along with rising maintenance costs over two or three decades and then what do you do in 2050? Build another stadium? Redevelop the existing one? It's a repeating cycle and I think it's even debatable if we would have paid off the debt of building a stadium over the sort of time period. However my main objection is that Fir Park is Motherwell FC's spiritual home and if you take that away, for me anyway, you don't have the spirit any more.

Tale of two keepers today. Livvie keeper has let a shot go straight through him for the first goal. Then right at the end Gillespie had made another point saving stop. You'll take it of course but I felt we were a little bit fortunate to get the win today and I suspect Livingston will be a wee bit disappointed to get nothing out of it. Started very, very flat and although we had a lot of possession we didn't do a lot with it and Livingston looked the more likely of the two to score. Got a big slice of fortune with the first goal (second time this week) but if you can get shots on target these things happen. For Livingston's penalty I didn't get a great view but it looked clumsy from Cole. Thereafter it was fairly even and the game pepped up a bit. Though we improved notably when James Scott came on to replace the ineffective Cole who I don't think should start if he's being played wide. Overall we were a bit laboured today but we kept at it and didn't revert to hoofball which is a big tick from me.

In a league where goal scoring is a vanishing art, outside the Old Firm anyway, Livingston have managed to put the ball in the net fairly regularly. In fact they have the third best goals total away from home in the league. They haven't been as tight defensively, conceded in every away match and at least two in all but one, so it could actually turn out that we get a few goals in the game.

Agree. Suspect Hearts would be something of a poisoned chalice for Robinson. I'm happy enough with him at the moment as our manager but when you boil it down to the facts he's not shown the level of managerial ability that suggests he could go to a much bigger club, with much more pressure, much more media focus, much more expectation and turn them round from a historic low ebb. It's taken him two and half seasons to make us look like we might finish Top 6 (and there is still a LOT of the season to go and things could change radically) and he's just not going to get that time at Hearts. And if you look at Hearts they have pretty much chewed and spat out managers over the last 10 years. Outside of Levein, who got 3 years, they have gone through 7 other managers in 7 years. Of course it could be that Robinson is a better manager now than when he came to the club. He certainly seems to have altered his footballing philosophy but if I was at Hearts looking for a manager I'd be looking for someone who'd had sustained success and right now Robinson's highs have been flash in the pan. 3rd at this stage is fine but the league season is only 25% done and Levein had Hearts top at this stage last season to illustrate how misleading that can be. Jack Ross seems like a better fit for them. Big club experience and had that rapid turn around at St. Mirren where they went from bottom of the Championship to league winners in a short time.

Thought it was a decent performance without a real stand out player - you could probably give it to half a dozen of the team. Thought Carroll, Campbell, Donnelly and Cole all had good matches but I'm going to give it to Gillespie because his save at the end has given us the 3 points.

It was half a good performance tonight, that half being the half we were on the ball. Keep possession quite well, pinged it about, always looking for a pass. Maybe didn't create a huge amount of chances but I always felt we had a goal in us, especially with Kilmarnock sitting really deep at times in the 2nd half, for me you just can't do that and not concede. The other half wasn't quite so good. Looked defensively frail, especially Grimshaw, and when Kilmarnock had the ball they didn't really look like they had one man less for most of the game. Took a great save from Gillespie in the last few minutes to secure the points and I thought Brophy caused us a lot of problems, if he'd started over Jackson I don't think that would have been to our benefit. Overall though I thought it was a good game and a good performance albeit with a touch of good fortune about it, our first goal looked to me like it should have been a routine save from the keeper and our game management in the closing stages of matches needs some work. Good to see Cole getting some goals now.

I always felt the closest comparisons in Scottish football were guys like Christie in particular and perhaps Rogic. Celtic already have these guys. Having said that perhaps Christie will move on. He's performed really well in Europe this season and that's where the scouts really take note of people.

Personally I'm completely ambivalent about Robinson and I'm not sure why anyone would be against him outside of him being ultimately responsible for results and performances. Also bringing up St. Johnstone is a bit silly. Tommy Wright has a 40% win ratio over 300 matches. He has four Top 6 finishes in 6 seasons, won a Scottish Cup and has had some decent European results. And all at a club with the second lowest average attendance in the league. Robinson hasn't achieved anything like what Tommy Wright has. It's not even close.

Only Celtic have beaten Kilmarnock in the last 8 league matches and excluding the Celtic match, they have only conceded once in that time and that was an OG. We've lost 3 out of 5 home matches so I think we really need to grind something out of this one but looking at it form wise we haven't been able to beat the top 6 teams that we've played - Rangers, Celtic, Ross County, Aberdeen... Although we have been sitting in a higher league position I think that right now we are still struggling a little bit to move out of that 'middle rank' where we usually beat the lower level teams but can't quite match the better teams.

I've been keeping a record of kits worn for a couple of seasons now and there is no consistency whatsoever. Last season we were more likely to wear our change kit against teams in green than red or maroon and changed our away socks and home shorts in an apparently random manner.

Problem is we probably didn't sign this guy for sweeties. I'm guessing as a Danish international that's played at a good level he's probably one of our higher earners. Some times there are unfortunate circumstances and every transfer has a risk element but I can't help feel for a club with not much money we squander rather a lot of it. Over the last five seasons or so player turn over has been huge, and an awful lot of those players have contributed nothing. I don't think our 'bang for buck' has been quite where it should have been over a period of time and it's something we should be looking to improve on.

We should be using last weeks results going into this game. Firstly our performance just wasn't acceptable and everyone needs to find a different level of performance. The fact that we are playing at Ibrox doesn't matter. We need guys to stand up this week. Secondly Hearts showed that Rangers aren't unstoppable and while I didn't see the whole game, only the highlights, surely we should be pouring over it to see what Hearts did to basically stop Rangers dead in their tracks. I also think Rangers result last week can be used against them this week. Rangers will know dropping more points is a big no-no and is potentially nervy for Rangers. If we make it difficult we can use 40,000 Rangers supporters in our favour. Of course we need to keep it locked up to do that and for me we really need to look at the full back positions because the guys that played last week aren't good enough defensively.

To be honest I don't think anyone should be getting picked out this week. We failed as a whole today, right through the starting XI and up to and including the manager. Tough couple of weeks coming up. Everyone will have to step up because today was a no show.

Have said it before but I'd play Cole over Long in this set up. Long is a two up front guy.

Hard to imagine a more comprehensive pumping. Match analysis will be pretty simple. Aberdeen defended better, were better in midfield and more dangerous going forward. Our manager didn't react quickly enough tactically to obvious deficiencies and the first couple of substitutions were pointless. Overall it could and should have been more than 0-3. A total failure from top to bottom.

Would love to win this one but as a long term fan I know that these are exactly the kind of games we get nervous about. I'm assuming Aberdeen will have McKenna and Devlin playing together for the first time in a while so you'd imagine that they will be stronger defensively. Cosgrove isn't much more than a big rough boy hopefully we can match him physically. Shay Logan has usually been a decent player at this level but recently he's been absolutely stinking. Would suggest that might be an area we look at.

The thing with managers in recent day Scottish football is that you don't have to be any good to have 'relative' success. If you have 10 dopes taking a maths exam one of them will still be top of the class. The jump up to English football level is colossal.

Went for Hartley.